A few months ago, while my Twitter and Tumblr feeds were being entirely overwhelmed by the animated gif version of Tao Lin’s novel, Taipei, and it seemed that it was about to become 2013’s answer to Gangnam Style, I began exploring the Alt-Lit movement, and it struck me that this was a sort of update on the Beat Generation.

With the rise of Alt-Lit, we have seen a group of urban hipsters once again come to prominence and stamp their name on contemporary literature. Where Kerouac and Ginsberg brought spontaneous prose and jazz rhythm to their narratives, Alt-Lit writers have incorporated their own internet age-vernacular and challenged established literary convention.

Damascus (Two Dollar Radio) is a depressing, raw, and touching novel, the latest tale of lost misfits and depraved losers from Joshua Mohr. Here we find Owen, the owner of the bar Damascus, who dresses as Santa Claus, a man with a birthmark under his nose that makes him look like a modern day Hitler. There is a man dying of cancer, No Eyebrows, who simply wants to be touched. There is Shambles, the jerk-off queen, who is willing to do just that, her marriage recently ended in divorce, haunting the late night bars with no purpose or goal in mind. There is Revv, the bartender, a tattooed drunk whose last act may be one of cowardice. And there is Syl, a controversial artist who brings a wave of doom upon the bar, stirring up trouble from war veterans by depicting dead soldiers in her painting while nailing fish to the already stagnant walls of Damascus.

Monday afternoon was my day to see the girl. She was 7.

The hangover wasn’t too bad and I drove down to Santa Monica via Pico Boulevard. When I got there the door was open. I pushed in. She was writing a note. The mother of my child. Her name was Vicki.

“I was just going to leave you this note. Louise is at Cindy’s.”

“O.K.”

“Look. Could I have some money?”

“How much?”

“Well, I could use $45 now.”

“I can only let you have 20.”

“All right.”

She lived in an unfurnished one-bedroom Synanon apt., $130 a month. Vicki was one of those who had to always belong to some organization . . . she had gone from poetry reading workshops to the communist party to Synanon. Whenever she became insulated she went to a new organization. Well, that was as sensible as anything else.

We walked over to Cindy’s. Cindy was black. The 2 girls played with their paper dolls on the floor. Her mother was white, fat and in bed.

“She’s got asthma,” Vicki said to me.

“Hello,” I said to Cindy’s mother.

Cindy’s father wasn’t about. He was on the cure and working a gas station.

“Will you drive me to Synanon?” Vicki asked. “Or I can take the bus.”

(Synanon had a bus line too.)

“All right,” I said, “I’ll drive you down.”

“Come on, Louise,” she said, “pick up your stuff and let’s go.”

“But, Mommy, I just want to get this last dress on the doll.”

“All right, but hurry up” . . .

 

I left Vicki off in front of the building. Then we drove east.

“Where we going, Hank?”

“To the beach, I guess.”

“But I wanted to go to the Synanon beach . . .”

“The beaches are all alike . . . there’s dirty water and dirty sand.”

Louise began sobbing. “But I wanted the Synanon beach! They don’t like war! They don’t kill people!”

“Look, little one, we’re almost at the other beach. Let’s try it anyhow.”

“But people don’t carry guns at Synanon!”

“You’re probably right, but I’m afraid that sometimes we still need guns just like we need knives and forks.”

“Silly,” she said, “you can’t eat with a gun!”

“A lot of people do,” I said.

It was winter and cold and there weren’t many cars about or people either. Louise had had lunch at noon but I hadn’t eaten yet. We walked into the little Jewish grocery store next to the candleshop. I got a hotdog, some chips and a 7-UP. Louise got some kind of candy cracker and a 7-UP. We walked to the last cement table near the water.

“It’s cold,” I said. “Let’s turn our backs to the sea.”

So we sat there facing the boardwalk. There were 14 or 15 people about but they had the strange tranquility of the seagulls, the winter seagulls. No, it wasn’t a tranquility but a deadness. They were like bugs. They simply stood or sat together, motionless, not talking.

“It’s too bad I have to look at those people,” I said, biting into my hotdog.

“Why don’t you want to look at them?”

“They have no desire.”

“What’s ‘Desire’?”

“Well, let’s see. ‘Desire’ is wanting something you usually can’t get right when you want it, but if you have enough ‘Desire’ you can sometimes get it anyhow . . . Oh, hell—that sounds like ‘Ambition’ which is something you’re trained to do instead of something you want to do . . . Let’s just say that those people don’t want anything.”

“Those people don’t want anything?”

“Right. In a sense, nothing affects them so they don’t want anything, they aren’t anything. Especially in Western Civilization.”

“But that’s the way they are. Maybe that’s a good way to be.”

“Some wise men say so. I guess all of everything is how you work at it. A direction. I still don’t like to look at those people while I’m eating.”

“Hank! You’re not nice! There’s nothing wrong with those people! I ought to slap you across the face with this cracker!”

She picked up the cracker as if to hit me with it. I thought that was very funny. I laughed. She laughed too. We both felt good together, at last.

We finished eating and walked down toward the water. I sat down on a little cliff above the water and wet shore, and Louise built a sand castle . . .

It was then that I noticed the two men walking along the waterfront from the east. And the one man walking along the waterfront from the west. They all appeared to be in their mid-twenties. The man walking from the west had a large bag and seemed to be stopping and picking things up and dropping them into this bag. He didn’t seem to sense the two men approaching him from the east, but there was still quite a football field between them. 2 football fields.

The two walking from the east had on heavy boots and kicked at things along the shore. The one from the west almost swayed in the wind, bending over, picking up things for his paper sack. And I thought, it’s too bad, but the poor guy with the paper sack doesn’t realize that the other two guys are going to jump on him and beat him up. Can’t he realize that? It was a surety. And since I sensed it, I couldn’t understand how the guy with the bag couldn’t sense it. And the lifeguard in his little white shack on stilts . . . couldn’t he see?

It almost happened in front of me. All the men had beards but the 2 from the east had shorter beards; their beards almost looked angry . . . The guy with the paper sack just had hair all over his face and neck and back and front and everywhere. Then he looked up and saw the other two
. . . He tried to walk around them, on the side toward the sea. Just then a wave rolled in and the guy nearest him pushed him into the water. His paper sack went out with the tide.

As he got up, the other guy hit him and he went down again and then they were kicking at his body and his face with their boots. At first he held his hands over his face, then his hands fell away, but they kept kicking at his face.

Then they rolled him over and took something out of his pocket. A wallet. They took something out of the wallet and then threw the wallet far out into the sea.

Then they looked around and saw me sitting there. They looked at me. It was a kind of zoo thing—the way monkeys looked at you. They could see that I was old but they could see that I was big too, and I looked bigger in that black lumberjack my landlord had given me.

I looked at their faces and noticed that they were not particularly brave faces. I turned to the kid and told her, “You stay up here on the sand . . .”

Then I leaped from the cliff and hit the wet sand and walked toward them. I pulled the switchblade, hit the button and the blade jumped out.

They didn’t move. Their game. I moved forward.

Then one guy started running and the other guy moved after him. They ran down the shore, around the pile of searocks and were gone. The lifeguard still stared out
at sea . . .

I walked over to the guy and turned him over. Sand was mixed in with blood and hair. I took the sea water as it came in and splashed it over his face. Hair grew upon his face where it wasn’t supposed to grow. It grew right in near the nose. I don’t mean under it, I mean right around the edges of the nose. Up by the eyes. There was a bird-like thing about him, an inhuman thing about him. I disliked him. I helped him up.

“You o.k.?”

“Yeah. Yeah. But they took my money. 3 dollars. My money’s gone.”

I picked him up and walked him over to a small cliff, away from Louise and sat him down.

“I live under the pier,” he said.

“Are you serious?”

“5 years now. I think it’s been 5 years.”

“I can only give you a dollar.”

“Will you?”

“Here.”

The dollar seemed to bring him out of it.

“Do you live around here?” he asked.

“No. Los Angeles.”

“How do you make it?”

“Luck, I guess.”

Then Louise waved from her sand castle. I waved back. My friend and I looked out at sea. A small ugly boat of some sort was slowly passing by out there, doing something.

Then my friend said, “Yesterday 2 guys were sucking each other off under the pier and some plain-clothes cops caught them and locked them up. Do you think that’s right?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said.

“I mean,” he said, “if 2 guys want to suck each other off, that’s their business, isn’t it?”

“Well, looking at it from that angle, I suppose you’re right . . . But look, I’ve got to check on my little girl right now.”

I walked over and sat down by Louise.

My friend walked up the sand toward the boardwalk.

She smiled at me:

“You like my castle?” she asked.

I looked.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, “but better than that, it’s very nice.”

“What’s the difference between ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Very nice’?”

“Well, ‘Beautiful’ is usually what people say when they don’t mean it and ‘it’s very nice’ is usually what they way when they really mean it.”

“Oh.”

It was a very nice sand castle. We both hated to leave it there like that, so we smashed it down with our feet. Then she held my hand as we walked across the sand toward the parking lot. There were quite some hours left in our Monday together and we needed something different to do.

 

Copyright © 2011 by the Estate of Charles Bukowski. Afterword copyright © 2011 by David Stephen Calonne.

Photo by Michael Montfort, printed with kind permission of Daisy Montfort. Copyright © 2011 by Daisy Monfort for the Estate of Michael Monfort.

Used with permission by City Lights Books. 

 

An Interview with Editor David Calonne about More Notes of a Dirty Old Man

 

There are very few people cool enough to work on gathering the long-lost weekly stories of Charles Bukowski, but David Calonne, the editor of More Notes of a Dirty Old Man: The Uncollected Columns is just that cool.

I read the latest posthumous offering by Charles Bukowski, and, as the man himself is no longer with us and therefore could not complete the standard TNB self-interview, Mr. Calonne graciously answered questions about both Buk and this new collection.  He did so with humor, verve and amazing scholarship.  For technical reasons, and in the name of TNB tradition, we’ll be calling this David Calonne’s “self-interview.”  But of course I’m playing my small part in the process, as chief interrogator.  It is, as they say, a great honor.  -QM

 

Quenby Moone: You were set with a huge task of editing Bukowski’s columns for the LA Free Press and NOLA Express, unseen for decades. There must have been a huge number to sift through. What was the thread that wove through the ones that ended up in the book? Did you find that there was a “theme,” or did the book arise more organically? 

David Calonne: Yes, Bukowski wrote hundreds of the “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” columns for LA Free Press, NOLA, Open City as well as High Times, National Underground Review, and several other periodicals. My only principle of selection was to choose the best ones I could find. I also tried to have a variety of all the different kinds of writing Bukowski included in the “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” series: story, essay, interview, and I even included some of Bukowski’s wonderful aphorisms which he submitted under the humorous title “Ecce Hetero.” Bukowski even published poems and cartoons (what we call “graphic fiction”now) in the “Dirty Old Man” series and if this book does well, I hope to do another and publish some of this material as well. I included an interview a professor did of Bukowski as well as Bukowski’s own interview of Jon Webb of Loujon Press which created his first two great books of poetry, It Catches My Heart In Its Hands and Crucifix in a Deathhand.

This interview with Webb is very interesting, illustrating how involved Bukowski had been from the beginning with the actual production of his books and how excited he was about the whole process of making books. I also included an excellent long short story—almost a novella—entitled “My Friend, The Gambler,” which describes the period during the making of Barfly.  That’s the amazing thing I’ve discovered doing these Bukowski anthologies—that there are these fantastic gems which have been not been published in book form because Bukowski was so incredibly prolific. He resembles writers like D.H. Lawrence or Robert Graves or Henry Miller or William Saroyan-these incredibly productive geniuses who seemed incapable of writing a dull line.

When I wrote the “Afterword”, I think I did try to explain what I saw as one underlying “theme” of many of the “Dirty Old Man” series, which is the estrangement and alienation of modern society which Bukowski I think quite deliberately at once exposes, describes and seeks to illuminate. “Sex” or “sexuality” is just the screen for his allegory—I mean his writing is and is not about a “dirty old man.” It’s about human beings seeking authentic selfhood, however corny that may sound.

I’ve been reading a book of interviews with Anthony Burgess recently and he says this about Rabelais: “When Rabelais wrote his great book Gargantua and Pantagruel, he was not really glorifying vomit and defecation and drunkenness; he was telling a symbolic story in which we are all thirsty for the faith, and the wine or beer or drunkenness is a kind of symbol of religious ecstasy” (Conversations with Anthony Burgess, p. 161). Bukowski refers to Rabelais several times in his stories and poems.

And although I don’t think Bukowski was “thirsty for the faith” in the sense of any orthodox religious system, he spoke often of wine as the “blood of the gods,” as the ancient Greek Dionysian connection to ecstasy. And he has many poems which are very close to Li Po, to this Taoist idea of being totally in the moment, totally involved with what one is experiencing at the moment. So too Bukowski is always writing about sex and drinking and vomiting and defecating and also not writing about sex and drinking and vomiting and defecating.  As he says in one of his poems, we seek more than flesh, and it is this seeking which is his true subject matter. Gary Snyder caught this about Bukowski. He liked his poems very much and remarked about Bukowski’s celebration of being a human animal.  It’s OK to be an animal, to have a body, there’s nothing to be guilty or ashamed about. I think here he is again close to D. H. Lawrence.

That was a long answer.

 

QM: The book is filed under “fiction,” a designation which confused me when I originally approached City Lights about featuring More Notes. And many of his columns are fictional, though most are not. 

Autobiographical writing is taking a huge hit right now because so many “autobiographies” have turned out to be fictionalized. But Bukowski never seemed to worry about the line. Does it make it more acceptable because he didn’t care? How can he help us understand the current climate in “non-fiction?”

DC: Well, the relationship between “fiction” and “autobiography” has always been murky. David Copperfield of course IS Charles Dickens, and is not. The complexity with Bukowski comes because he named his character “Chinaski” or “Chelaski” and sometimes uses “Bukowski” as the name of the “character” in his work and this tended to make people think he was always writing about himself. He was and he wasn’t. See number 1 above. He is a good deal of the time doing caricature, he is exaggerating and playing. He is often closer to Mad magazine, than to making an “accurate description” of his life, or to the German Expressionists. But he is writing stories, and novels.

I don’t see any problem here.

Also, Bukowski tended to make his life into a work of fiction by making up all kinds of stories about himself. For example, that he quit writing for ten years. He did no such thing. In 1952, when he was supposedly on his “ten year drunk,” was submitting poetry to Poetry Chicago. There was a five year period between 1951 and around 1956 when he didn’t publish anything, but he was still writing.

It might be truer to say he “fictionalized” his autobiography often in what he said about himself in interviews and even in his stories and poems. The mask was so tightly fastened on, the myth was so heavily propagated that you have to do some prying and digging to pull off that mask and decode that myth.

I think you also suggest in your question the link between Bukowski and the “New Journalism” as practiced by Mailer and Capote and Hunter S. Thompson and I think Bukowski was indeed doing something very similar. He was writing a newspaper column, which immediately raises the question: what is a story doing in a newspaper which is supposed to be “factual”? Also when he did do “reportage”, as in his account of going to a Rolling Stones concert in L.A. (I included this in Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook), he blurs the lines between writing an account bearing some relationship to verisimilitude and fiction: he makes a lot of stuff up.

Remember that Bukowski had wanted to be a journalist as a young man and he didn’t really get the chance until he was forty-seven years old, in 1967, which was just when all the “New Journalism” stuff was taking off. So yes, journalism, autobiography and fiction get mixed and subtly transformed in his writing. He does this of course also with poems which seem to be stories and letters which suddenly turn into poems and essays which include narrative, autobiographical elements, or interviews which we are not sure are actual interviews or made up by himself, etc.: he is always shape-shifting when it comes to “genre.”

 

QM: Buk’s greatest complaint is our isolation from each other (he calls Americans a bunch of “potential suicides”), that modern society had torn us apart rather than brought us together. This seems a relevant observation in our time–I’m interviewing you over the internet–and he really despises people who go to work in offices and then come home alone. Yet he seems quite comfortable in his own relatively menial position in the post office, and alone in his crummy apartment. He isolates himself as well. 

Sometimes he strikes me as a blue collar Holden Caulfield, protesting the phonies. What would he think of that comparison?

DC: Yes, he discusses the isolation of American life. I included the essay to which you refer in which he describes the women in his apartment coming home from work and retreating into their sterile environments. He had just moved into an apartment on Oxford Avenue in L.A. which he hated. He had been accustomed to living in “courts”, in small bungalows where he could look out his window and see the streets and people and taco stands of East Hollywood.

But yes, also he did “isolate” himself but I think he had little choice in this. From childhood, due to his abuse by his father, his disfiguring skin disease and the prejudice in Los Angeles against German-Americans following WWI, he had little choice but to become a reclusive solitary. Yes, he liked J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (it is said that the title of his novel Ham on Rye is an homage to Salinger) and the phony and the pretentious were things he very much disliked.

Remember that scene in Barfly when Mickey Rourke is in the car with Tully behind the slick Southern California couple: I think the guy has sunglasses and a sweater draped over his shoulder and the girl is a vapid dumb type and Mickey decides to ram their car with his bumper. That’s the classic Bukowski moment. He’s not resentful of these people, he simply is appalled by their soullessness. They have no depth, no passion, no fire, no pain, no tragedy, no creative aliveness—they are like everyone else, Heidegger’s Das Man, and are therefore dead.

He also has a poem in which he describes how Los Angelenos reacted during the earthquake of 1971 and what supreme coddled babies they are. When a real catastrophe strikes, they won’t know what to do. That’s why the last line of the “Ecco Hetero” aphorisms I included is “See you in Dresden.” The Germans had their country flattened, and as a German-American, Bukowski calibrates Californian phoniness in relation to that.

 

QM: When he helps a man getting beaten up on the beach, Buk makes a point of saying how much he dislikes him: “There was a bird-like thing about him, an inhuman thing. I disliked him.” Further on he refers to him as his friend. But he’s an acquaintance of circumstance, made of this violent event in which Bukowski intervened. There’s something disturbing about this exchange of emotion in Buk; perhaps highlighting his own, or maybe our fickleness. 

This really defines a lot of Buk for me: swinging back and forth between dichotomies. Was this an element of the tone which runs through the book? 

DC: That’s an interesting moment you mention. That is one of my favorite stories. He has picked up his daughter from his ex-wife and is taking her to the beach. He witnesses this violent episode. I think when he calls him his “friend” the first time, it is perhaps tongue-in-cheek. That one would expect that man to have grateful feelings because he intervened when he was beaten. It is only jarring later if you think he meant he was the “friend” of this man. Remember at the beginning of the story, he describes his dislike of the empty people he sees on the beach.

Yes, Bukowski and his characters can be down, depressed, despairing, cynical. Yet as the story shows, he was also supremely sensitive and “idealistic.” You know Beethoven wrote his “Ode to Joy” based on Schiller’s poem about universal human brotherhood but that apparently didn’t prevent Beethoven from being very unpleasant to his fellow human beings.  At the core of Romanticism—and Bukowski is a supreme Romantic—is this seeming dichotomy between the urge for a transcendent vision of human possibility and the horrible truth of what humans are actually like. And Bukowski frequently would say that he finds this loathsome thing within himself as well. You only become cynical and depressed and down if you have high expectations.

I actually don’t think Bukowski was a nihilist. He’s in the line of Beethoven, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky—those tormented mad guys, but tortured because they wanted so much, not because they were satisfied with the little they saw.

 

QM: He’s a Luddite, though never identifies himself as such. Did reading these criticisms in the age of the internet/permanent entertainment color the editing process? What was your internal monologue as you edited his work? 

DC: Why do you say he’s a Luddite? He actually very much enjoyed his word processor which he got in 1990 and marveled over how much writing he was able to accomplish. He worried at the outset that he was “selling his soul” to the new-fangled consumerist stuff, but he got very hooked on the computer. I think if you mean he was a loner, i.e. preferred writing, listening to Sibelius and Stravinsky and Mahler and Shostakovich rather than doing anything else such as going to the movies, that is correct. If he were alive today, he would probably make use of the new gadgets to the extent that they helped his writing, but it is hard to imagine him multi-tasking or creating a Facebook page.

 

QM: You’re a scholar of Beats and Bukowski. What’s their relationship? Bukowski seems to elude any designation, but seems to fit the profile of a Beat in some ways. How does he fit into literature as a whole? What are his lasting influences upon lit? 

DC: My first book was on William Saroyan and I see Bukowski in the line of Walt Whitman and then Saroyan and John Fante. I published a small book in 2010, Bebop Buddhist Ecstasy: Saroyan’s Influence on Kerouac and the Beats with an Introduction by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (San Francisco: Sore Dove) in which I explored these links.  Saroyan influenced Kerouac’s style through his jazzy prose in his early stories.

For example, Saroyan has a story from 1936  called “Baby” which has the following passage:

Sang baby. O maybe. Sang motors and wheels till Saturday night in America, and a hundred thousand jazz orchestras sang So come sit by my side if you love me, and the sad-eyed, weary-lipped Mexican girl silenced Manhattan uproar with soft, velvet-petaled singing of darkness and death, O heart there is no end to the river’s flowing. Sang locomotive north through snow to Albany and west to Chicago, O baby maybe.

Well, if you read that to someone they would think it was by Kerouac, but it is Saroyan, 1936. So you hear the influence. The jazzy, hip, fast, Benzedrine, lyrical prose is there. Bukowski loved the early Saroyan, and this high Romantic lyricism is very much in Bukowski’s early poems and stories. Bukowski also wrote a review of Allen Ginsberg’s Empty Mirror, met Gregory Corso (and liked him), was reviewed positively in the New York Times Book Review by Kenneth Rexroth, was published by Ferlinghetti, and appeared in all the same magazines as the Beats so there is definitely a connection.

But the difference is that Bukowski didn’t go to India, didn’t do a lot of drugs (he did a few but preferred alcohol), he was solitary and didn’t like the Beats’ “clubbiness”, loved Mozart and Bach rather than Jefferson Airplane, etc. So I would say he is similar to the Beats in his urge towards transcendence and in his opposition to American militarism, racism, materialism, etc. but he is essentially apolitical; and rather than an Eastern mystic he is close I think to the ancient Gnostics who believed the sacred is within the self. He is close to D.H. Lawrence in this, I think.

And he is closer to the “inhumanism” of Robinson Jeffers than to any patchouli-scented, incense-burning, “love is all you need,” guitar strumming person.

 

QM: What were the differences between this collection and the other Buk books you’ve edited? 

DC: The first Bukowski book I edited was a book of his interviews, Sunlight Here I Am (2003) then came the two volumes I did for City Lights: Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook (2008) and Absence of the Hero (2010). These last two contained stories and essays, but I also included some “Dirty Old Man” columns in both of them.

This time, I floated the idea to Garrett Caples at City Lights of doing an all-Dirty-Old-Man book and he also got very hyped-up with the idea so that’s how this latest one happened. Garrett had the idea of making it a kind of companion volume to the famous first Notes of a Dirty Old Man, first published in 1969 by Essex House and then reprinted in 1973 by City Lights. So the book will be the same approximate size as the original and also is organized like the first one with no titles or breaks between the stories and essays.

It is a very cool book, if I say so myself.

 

QM: Any final thoughts? Something we, as a bunch of Bukowski readers, need to know? 

DC: No, I think that about covers it. I very much enjoyed putting the book together and I hope you enjoy it too.

 

 

The first “novel” I ever finished writing wasn’t really a novel at all. It was a true story told in the third person, with all the names changed but the same events and surroundings. It was called Poundland and it was about a year I spent working at a single-price retailer.

It began in the summer of 2007, when I finished working at a hotel in St. Andrews and returned to Dundee for my final year of university. Over the summer I had for the first time in my life become accustomed to having money, and I had made the decision to work weekends during my final year so that it would be the first I didn’t spend in poverty.

The only job I could find, though, was at Poundland, and I only got that because my flatmate worked there. Jobs were hard to come by in Dundee and Poundland was the lowest of the low. It was one of the few places that actually paid the minimum wage. Poundland was a place people joked about and avoided at all costs… both as a place to work and to shop. The customers and staff were the most desperate and hopeless people I ever knew.

Over the years, I’ve been proud to have my fiction appear alongside writers I greatly admire (William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Margaret Atwood). The first poems I ever published came out in an issue of The Hudson Review that contained James Wright’s last-from his wonderful final book, This Journey. It meant a lot to me.

I’ve recently been doing a big clean out…and in staggering down memory lane, one name keeps appearing with baffling frequency…LYN LIFSHIN. She is everywhere. And of course, my humble publication record doesn’t even give the slightest hint of just how truly ubiquitous she is.

If there’s ever been a journal that has published poetry, the Vegas odds are she’s been in it. It’s astounding. Over 120 books she’s published–I think. Thousands of mag publications. Literally.

I’m torn between admiring such prolific output…and wondering about all the postage. I imagine all the cover letters…the envelopes laid out in long hallways (like M.C. Escher winding stairs). What must the machine behind that enterprise look like? Simply to keep so much material out in the mail is a logistical feat.

And keeping track. Last week I got a “thanks but no thanks” letter from the Indiana Review–for work submitted three years ago! I’d forgotten I’d written the piece, let alone sent it. Maybe Lyn’s just really well organized.

I think too of the loneliness of some poor editor of what will end up being a two issue journal or webzine…and they don’t get a submission from Lyn. How would you feel? Lyn, we’re waiting…

I’ve occasionally considered the possibility that Lyn isn’t actually an individual, but a code name for a cooperative.

Then the truly disturbing notion occurred that perhaps she’s doing a Joyce Carol Oates on us (one of the funniest articles I’ve ever read was on Oates, in the Atlantic Monthly, called “Stop Me Before I Write Again”)…not only publishing endlessly under her own name, but under a range of pseudonyms. Lyn might be sitting back and thinking, “Hmm, I’ve got 200 poems I wrote yesterday, how am I going to get them all out?” Yes, a ticklish question arises for Lyn Lifshin scholars-just how much contemporary poetry is she responsible for?

Questions fill my mind in the case of writers like Lifshin and Oates. Do they lick all the stamps themselves? Have they ever lost a piece of writing? I just found a whole book I’d forgotten about and am resurrecting. A BOOK-not one poem or story. Admittedly, one of the reasons I’d forgotten about the book is that it was written in a period of deep alcoholic and narcotic confusion in Tonga, where it actually seemed like a reasonable proposition to shoot a speargun at a government official trying to protect himself with a giant tortoiseshell (I got the bastard, don’t you worry–right in the thigh-and then I got my passport back).

I watched 200 handwritten pages blow out the window of a twin engine Otter over Papua New Guinea and seriously considered going after them (I was skydiving then and figured the jungle canopy would be kind to me). Then I thought they looked rather lovely floating down. They reminded me of a great moment at an old Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference concerning the soon to die John Gardner–his angry ex-wife had hired a plane to drop leaflets all over sunny green Middlebury, exposing his cadlike behavior. My friend Stanley Elkin, who had to walk with a cane because of MS, insisted I scurry after some. Tim O’Brien and I laughed ourselves sick.

I wonder too if Lyn and Joyce are now diligent about backing up. They’d be good backers up. Press Save. Press Send. I only recently lost 150 pages in a computer crash. Bang. Gone. Imagine how Lyn and Joyce would feel.

I’m very suspicious of people who are well organized and save everything. Hunter S. Thompson (someone you’d think I’d be pretty supportive of) worried me with his neatly mimeographed letters.

As Miles Davis once said…and I happened to hear because I was the only one with him…he wasn’t exactly talking to me…”Not all music has to be heard to be listened to.” It was kind of a Bruce Lee insight.

Some writers are so prolific you wonder how they have time to even proofread their work, let alone actually read it back and consider. William T. Vollman is a good example. You can skip not just pages, but whole sections. Hell, you can skip books.

What’s my point? Well, I don’t apologize for that speargun incident one bit. That dill hole had it coming and I nailed him. I tracked him down and I hit the target. It happened in the lobby of the Dateline Hotel. I pressure packed him and reassured the guests who witnessed it. “Just a personal matter,” I said.

It’s easy to forget words-and let’s face it, most of them should be forgotten. I couldn’t quote a Lyn Lifshin poem to save my balls. You remember people you wound-and help.

The strategy of trying to put out as much as you can into the fossil record of culture is fair. Just as long as it has the thzing. That’s what the speargun sounded like.

It was beautiful. I took a pompous little civil servant down, on the run, at 10 feet, missing a major artery. I got my passport back and legal clearance to leave the country. I left behind the book I was writing then. Cost of doing business. It’s taken me a long time to learn just what business I’m in.

It’s called Thzing. Our mission statement is “Wounding and helping.” We choose our shots-and when to extend a hand. Let others crank shit out.

Like a grown-up version of musical chairs, speed dating was all the rage during the post-9/11 urge to merge. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center left some couples clinging to each other as if their very survival depended on it. Other relationships snapped under the pressure. Young singles who were previously perfectly happy on their own suddenly felt compelled to pair off.

As with everything in those frightening months, time was of the essence. Activities that separated the wheat from the chaff were in high demand. We wanted to spend quality time with our loved ones, write our wills, donate to patriotic causes, and contemplate the meaning of life. All of this while being slightly suspicious of everyone around us.

Speed dating was just what the doctor ordered: a single location for multiple, time-limited dates in one evening without the bother of having to offer or receive awkward rejections.

Several months after the traumatic break-up of my almost three-year relationship, my friend Karen asked me to accompany her to a speed dating event. While I knew that we were both feeling the urge to merge ourselves, I was stunned that she’d consider such a thing. Of course I told her no way, but she reminded me that I hadn’t had a single date since my break-up. I honestly don’t know what possessed me, but I agreed.

The plan was that we would meet in the restaurant’s bar where the event was being held. That way, we could walk into the special event room together. The bar was filled with couples holding hands while they waited for their tables. The tables were filled with couples who ate from each other’s plates and finished each other’s sentences. The acoustics created by the high ceiling in the cavernous space made for a carnival-like experience. I waited and waited. Finally, my phone rang. I started for the exit as soon as I saw Karen’s number on the caller ID. Of course she wasn’t coming. Stuck at work. Of course I wasn’t staying.

Then she reminded me that I had already paid for the event so I may as well attend. I should “be open to possibilities.” She wanted a full report later, and she offered that perhaps the evening would make a funny story one day.

Um, yeah right…

I walked through the dining room filled with happy couples toward the event room. Dead woman walking. Perhaps I should have paused for my last meal. The Pasta Bolognese smelled amazing.

For some reason, I feared I would be the lone geek in a room full of poised and accomplished young professionals. I envisioned well-dressed lawyers and doctors sipping sophisticated cocktails and partaking in witty conversations about their stock portfolios, foreign policy, or literature. With quivering knees, I entered the room to find men segregated on one side and women on the other. Good Lord, it was eighth grade with pink girlie drinks for the women and beer for the men!

The men were clumped into small groups pretending to be in deep conversation, while sneaking quick glances to size up each woman as she entered.

The women seemed oblivious to the men. They were all gathered around one woman at the bar who was rather loud and who sucked down drinks in single gulps. The woman was statuesque, a redhead, and the sister of a friend I’d dated briefly. She turned to welcome the newcomer into the tribe and immediately recognized me. She proceeded to introduce me as her brother’s ex-girlfriend, which was definitely not how I would have described myself. Looks of pity followed from the peanut gallery.

Hey, I went out with him for a few months in the course of a ten-year friendship. And we’re all single here. Why else would we put ourselves through this torture? Keep your pity to your damn selves! I thought.

The organizer, Patrick, was obviously a cheerleader back in high school. He rang an obnoxious bell and called everyone to the middle of the room. Women were in a semicircle to his right, and the men mirrored us on his left. A peppy spiel about being open to everyone, balanced with warnings about inappropriate behavior, ensued. He provided extensive directions about the proper way to fill out the scorecard. He didn’t actually call it a scorecard, but we all knew what it was.

There were several tables with numbers on them. Each woman was directed to pick one and have a seat. The men were told to approach a table one at a time for our seven minute “dates.” We were not allowed to talk before Patrick rang the begin-date bell nor were we allowed to speak after he rang the end-date bell. At the close of each date, the men were required to switch tables. They were not allowed to return to a table they’d already visited.

The first gent to approach me looked very much like Bill Gates. Not rich, just incredibly and stereotypically nerdy. Now New Orleans is not known for its beautiful people, but you generally think of people this geeky living near Silicon Valley, MIT, or Microsoft headquarters. I took a deep breath and prepared to be “open to possibilities.” He’d moved to, as he called it, The Big Easy (cringe) from the Midwest. I wasn’t surprised. I was being open. Nothing inherently evil about the Midwest. I have friends from the Midwest.

I asked him what his favorite things were about living in New Orleans. His answer: the food. Great, we had something in common. I could work with that for the next five minutes. I asked about his favorite restaurants. Chili’s and Applebee’s. Um, dude, you could have stayed in the cornfields and eaten at chain restaurants. Good grief.

Okay, next subject. I asked what he thought about Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, and our general party culture. He proudly informed me that after living in New Orleans for five years, he thought that this year would be the one when he “would go to the Bourbon Street to see the Fat Tuesday.”

For the uninitiated, the syntax of this sentence was utterly bizarre. It’s akin to someone in New York going to “the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue to view the celebration associated with the annual advancement of the Gregorian calendar.”

Ding!

In retrospect, Bachelor Number Two turned out to be the most promising of the lot. He had lived in New York making a living as a writer but had returned to New Orleans to run the family plumbing business after his brother suddenly died.

I’m sorry, did you say plumbing? As in pipes and poop? Okay, I had a big ick reaction but rallied on. After all, this guy was creative and responsible. What were the odds? I was opening to the possibilities more by the moment. We talked about his writing, which was heavily influenced by Charles Bukowski. Uh oh.

Now, here I must digress. Many people have types. Some men like women with blond hair. Some women like men who are really tall. My type was incredibly specific. For years, I dated men who played chess, juggled, ran cross-country in high school, and yes, were Bukowski acolytes. What can I say? Apparently, I liked them smart, agile, and highly dysfunctional. It wasn’t like I looked for them. I attracted them. It was an odd gift.

I never found out whether the plumber fit my other unconscious criteria. Once Bukowski was out of the bag, I was done. After all, I was there to break patterns, not repeat them. I somewhat sadly said goodbye when the bell rang.

Ding!

Bachelor Number Three’s appearance immediately set me back in my chair. He was wearing false eyelashes. Seriously. Not, I have a dermatological condition and have lost my eyelashes so I wear these so I don’t look weird false eyelashes, but Mary Tyler Moore from the Dick Van Dyke Show false eyelashes. It was stunning.

Somehow, I got over my mute shock and started a conversation. As it turned out, we were both Jewish and originally from New Orleans. I knew we did not belong to the same congregation because I’d surely have remembered this guy and his lashes. I asked him if he was affiliated. Yes, he did belong to a congregation, but he wasn’t too crazy about it. I asked if he’d attended services there all his life, and he said no. Apparently, his parents paid for his membership. They’d belonged to a number of congregations over the years because his mother tended to fight with people. Uh, how many Jewish stereotypes can you fit into a seven-minute date?

Ding! Thank G-d.

Now, I feel really guilty about describing Bachelor Number Four. He was very nice and seemed like a heck of a lot of fun. But he was remarkably short, maybe five feet tall in shoes, and a rodeo clown. Yes, you read that right. A rodeo clown. I was born in New Orleans, and I had no idea that there was enough rodeo work in the area to make it a full-time job. And maybe I’m being snobby here, but it seemed to me the speed dating people used a mighty liberal definition of the term “professional.”

I tried to maintain a conversation, but my mind drifted to the image of the little fellow emerging from a tiny car with 20 of his friends. Or maybe only circus clowns do that. Anyway, I feared I was going to hell for thinking these thoughts, but the night was so surreal. I felt like I was dating on acid: distortions of space and size, warping time, ringing bells.

Ding!

When Bachelor Number Five approached my table, I exhaled. He appeared perfectly normal, handsome even. He was dressed neatly but informally. He did hold his head at an unusual angle, but I thought he was just being flirtatious. I had no idea what the next seven minutes held.

As soon as he sat down, we agreed that it seemed like we’d met before. We didn’t live in the same neighborhood or hang out in the same places. Was it work? I told him what I did. He told me that he had his own business related to the casino industry. Definitely not work.

Okay, was he Jewish? New Orleans has a small enough Jewish community that sometimes you just know people because you’re Jewish. He responded by asking me if I was Jewish, and I said yes. He said he was not, but that I’d have known that if I had looked in his wallet. No money. Dude, I’d just told you I was Jewish and your reply was an anti-Semitic comment?

By then, I was kind of checking out, so he filled in the conversation with talk of his work. Apparently, the name of his business, 1-ey*d Jack, had special meaning but not for the reason people assumed. He said that he’d had the recent experience of presenting his business card to a “n***** woman” who worked in a casino on the Mississippi Coast. After she saw the name of his business, she indicated that she knew why it was named 1-ey*d Jack—by pointing to his crotch. At this moment in the story, he gestured to his groin. Dear Lord, was this some sort of Neo-Nazi screw with the racially-sensitive Jewish feminist Candid Camera?

No, he was getting to his point. It seemed his business was actually named 1-ey*d Jack because, although his name was not Jack, he had only one eye. The other eye was glass. He tapped it with his fingernail to prove it. I nearly vomited on the table.

Ding!

Throughout these seven-minute increments of hell, my friend’s sister was having a jolly good time. She whooped it up with one and all. I kept thinking she was so much better than I was at embracing the moment and being open to possibilities. Yeah, she is generally a much more go-with-the-flow kind of person than I am, but there were also the cocktails. I wished I’d followed her lead on that.

After 1-ey*d Jack, I was done, so the final bachelor was a dream. He spent the entire seven minutes on his cell phone. Oh, he’d occasionally glance in my direction and nod, but other than that, nada. I didn’t even get his name. As I stared off into space, the rodeo clown winked at me from across the room.

Now, I have to admit, there were a few other fellows there who were decidedly less remarkable than those I’ve described. At the time, they seemed only slightly less wrong. Maybe, between the nerd, the plumber, the eyelashes, the clown, and the penis, I missed a gem. I guess I’ll never know.

But Karen was right. It did make a damn good story.